Imaging and imaging guidance is becoming a more significant component of surgical care, from diagnosis of disease, monitoring of the disease, planning of the surgical approach, guidance during the procedure and follow-up after the procedure is complete, or as part of a multi-faceted treatment approach.
In many medical procedures tissue samples are excised or examined, for example, during the surgical removal of a tumor. Currently in the fields of medical imaging and surgical diagnostics, taking a tissue sample and performing histopathology examination of it using a microscope, often with staining of that tissue, remains the gold standard for tissue diagnosis. This involves resection in a surgical suite and transfer of the sample to a pathology laboratory.
However, this approach is fraught with problems and issues. For example, current methods of tissue analysis are unable to accurately and painlessly access tissue and can result in the possibility of seeding tumor cells through the biopsy process. It is also typically impractical to perform multiple biopsies to enable proper examination of heterogeneous tumors.
Tissue samples are also often mislabeling during the process, which can result due to sample mix-up or labelling errors resulting in faulty diagnosis. Furthermore, pathology results may be discordant with the imaging results. Current workflow also often has a poor feedback loop to radiologists, hindering them from improving their diagnostic accuracy for future cases. This also can result in an unnecessary delay between biopsy and pathology results, resulting in a reduction in positive patient outcomes.